Quick Specs

Editors' Review

Similar to Windows Paint with fewer tricks, this application is a decent piece of freeware if you're simply looking to dabble. The main program window of Brush Strokes Image Editor is an empty palette, so to speak; it's not crowded with the toolboxes often seen in design programs. Most program functions are found underneath the main menu as one-touch buttons. Though we liked this organization, it requires a bit of research to figure out which button does what (no alt-text appears when you move your cursor over a button, as is the case with other popular applications). Most traditional editing options, such as color and brightness adjustments or image rotation, are offered, yet we couldn't find an option for sharpening or cropping an image. Overall, Brush Strokes Image Editor isn't the most robust image editor out there, but as freeware it's useful if you'd rather use a tool other than a standard Windows Paint editor.

Publisher's Description

+

From PaulBirdSoft:
This paint program, graphics editor, photo manipulator, and bitmap editor is called Brush Strokes and has been a year in the making. If you've used Windows Paint before, you should be able to use this program with ease--and if not, you should still be able to use it with ease. Brush Strokes has many of the features of a professional product. You can edit images in a variety of formats (GIF, JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF, PCX, BMP, TARGA, and AVI); create images for Web sites; create and view GIF animations; adjust colors; apply filters, rotations, and transformations; use magic-wand selections; use any picture as a brush or fill pattern; blur and sharpen images; use frames from videos; and capture frames from video cameras.

It converted an Open Office Draw .odg document into a.jpg file, with some tweaks, like centring the text (not automatically, though, just by shaving pixels off the sides). I could control item positioning and size down to pixel level. Although I didn't use it, I liked it's ability to skew the image to any angle (not just rotation by 90Ã‚Â° or 180Ã‚Â°) with no apparent loss of quality. In spite of it's faults, it did the job!

Cons

No tool-tips on the toolbar, so it was difficult to know what the icons meant. No help included in the download. Very important for modern web-sites: no support for UTF-8 characters, e.g. ?Âœ. Not at all intuitive to use: it took me an hour to make some simple edits. However, having climbed the learning curve it should be easier next time.

This program has way more features than MSPaint. Tools include all the usual brushes plus: clone brush, blur, shade, liquify, filters, transparency, video frame capture and more. Right-clicking on each tool icon brings up a description, and most are easy to figure out. Another nice feature is that the program has a very small footprint. You just unzip to a folder and run it from there. To uninstall, just delete the folder. While this program can't be compared to Photoshop, as freeware it rocks.

Cons

There are no help files with the free version. Sometimes I get into modes I can't back out of. Without help files, I don't know if this is a glitch or just something I'm missing.

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